Archive for the ‘Russia’ Category

It was a pleasure (again) to speak to Sonali Kolhatkar on her Rising Up With Sonali show. We talked about Trump’s strike on three chemical weapons sites in Syria, and the outrage this caused among ‘anti-imperialists’ (as well as American strikes which killed thousands of civilians, but weren’t noticed, and the daily Assad-Russian-Iranian extermination of Syrians, which isn’t either). You can watch, or just listen, by following this link.

In 2003 the US and Britain invaded and occupied Iraq. At the time Saddam Hussein, certainly a mass-murdering tyrant, was nevertheless contained and quiescent. Neither was there a popular revolution to defend (that happened in 1991, following the Kuwait war, and American troops watched passively). The Iraq adventure – sold on cooked intelligence – was a hubristic war of choice.

In 2013, haunted by Iraq, the West refused to enforce President Obama’s chemical ‘red line’ in Syria. Here there was not only a popular revolution but (at that point) a democratic opposition too, militarily weak but enjoying vast popular support. And President Assad was not only raping, torturing and killing on an industrial scale, but also releasing jihadists from prison.

What happened next? Calculating the red line had switched to a green light, Assad escalated his assault. Iran sent Shia jihadists to fight on his behalf. This, alongside Assad’s ‘scorched earth’ strategy, provoked a Sunni backlash. ISIS grew in the chaos. So the West – striking a symptom now but not the cause – bombed Syrian cities anyway, killing thousands. Then Russia stepped in to save the regime from collapse. Its pretext was the war on ISIS, but over 80% of its bombs fell on opposition-held areas – and on schools, hospitals and markets – nowhere near ISIS territory.

Today over half a million Syrians are dead, and over eleven million displaced. 90% of civilian dead were killed by the regime and its allies. So long as such impunity persists, Syria will continue to generate terror and war.

Meanwhile ISIS atrocities and the refugee outflow poison our politics here, contributing to phenomena including Brexit and Donald Trump. And there’ll be more poison coming. Assad’s original war on his people has already birthed a series of regional and global conflicts. Iran’s participation in sectarian cleansing – and its occupation of swathes of eastern Syria – almost guarantees a strong ISIS resurgence. For seven years the crisis has only escalated.

Beyond the potential fireworks of the next days, the West needs a sustained strategy to protect Syrian civilians. Unfortunately there is no evidence that western leaders (specifically President Trump) are interested in or capable of any sustained strategy.

This should worry us. As well as burning Syria, Putin has swallowed Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine. Alongside the false Iraqi analogy we should also consider the example of the 1930s, when serial appeasement led not to peace but total war.

(Update 14 April: At first sight it seems that the strike destroyed three chemical weapons production sites. So it’s a deterrent message against chemical atrocities – but still not strong enough to have made the last atrocity look like a miscalculation. By gassing the resistance out of Douma, Assad saved thousands of loyalist troops. So as expected, after all the noise, appeasement of the Assad-Iran-Russian extermination of Syrians continues.

Those fearing ‘world war three’ and ‘aggression’ can go back to sleep. It’s just Muslims being bombed, tortured, raped, and expelled now. Assad’s extermination will continue. The Russian-Iranian occupations will deepen. The west will continue killing civilians in its endless whack-a-mole ‘war on terror’. But no heroic state airfields will be in danger.

PS. with regard to the WW3 fear…. if people followed closely they’d know that a couple of months agao a pro-Assad force attacked the US-backed SDF in eastern Syria. An American plane destroyed the attacking force. Later it was discovered that dozens of the dead troops were Russians – both regular soldiers and Wagner mercenaries. Putin said nothing. The Russian media was quiet. Russia is strong only because it’s being appeased, and it knows it. Though collaboration may be a better word than appeasement.)

In 2011, people in the eastern Ghouta (and throughout Syria) protested for freedom, dignity and social justice. The Assad regime replied with gunfire, mass arrests, torture and rape. The people formed self-defence militias in response. Then the regime escalated harder, deploying artillery and warplanes against densely-packed neighbourhoods. In August 2013 it choked over a thousand people to death with sarin gas. Since then the area has been besieged so tightly that infants and the elderly die of malnutrition.

Seven years into this process – first counter-revolutionary and now exterminatory – the Ghouta has tumbled to the lowest pit of hell. This didn’t have to happen. Nor was it an accident. Local, regional and global powers created the tragedy, by their acts and their failures to act. And Arab and international public opinion has contributed, by its apathy and relative silence.

Blame must be apportioned first to the regime, and next to its imperialist sponsors. Russia shares the skies with Assad’s bombers, and is an equal partner in war crime after war crime, targeting schools, hospitals, first responders and residential blocks.

Then Iran, which kept Assad afloat by providing both a financial lifeline and a killing machine. Iran’s transnational militias provided 80% of Assad’s troops around Aleppo, and some surround the Ghouta today. Their participation in the strategic cleansing of rebellious (and overwhelmingly Sunni) populations helped boost a Sunni jihadist backlash and will continue to provoke sectarian conflict in the future.

But the blame stretches further. American condemnations of the current slaughter, for instance, ring very hollow in Syrian ears. The Obama administration, focused on achieving a nuclear deal with Iran, ignored Iran’s build-up in Syria. It also ensured the Free Syrian Army was starved of the weapons needed to defend liberated zones. And by signalling his disengagement after the 2013 sarin atrocity, Obama indirectly but clearly invited greater Russian intervention. Since the rise of ISIS, the United States has focused myopically on its ‘war on terror’, bombing terrorists – demolishing cities and killing civilians in the process – but never deploying its vast military might in a concerted manner to protect civilians. Objectively, despite the rhetoric, the US has collaborated with Russia and Iran.

French President Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, called for a humanitarian truce to allow civilians to evacuate. This sounds humane, and if the fall of Aleppo is any guide, it’s probably the best scenario Ghouta residents can expect. But the proposal’s lack of ambition illustrates the current dysfunction of the global system. Instead of acting to stop the slaughter and siege, European statesmen support mass population expulsion, requesting only that it be done as gently as possible.

In solidarity with Aleppo, the lights on the Eiffel Tower were extinguished. Elsewhere in Paris, and in London, Amsterdam, Oslo and Copenhagen, people demonstrated against the slaughter. Turks rallied outside Russian and Iranian embassies and consulates in Istanbul, Ankara and Erzerum. The people of Sarajevo – who have their own experience of genocide – staged a big protest.

The protests are nothing like as large as they were when the United States bombed Iraq, but they are welcome nonetheless. If this level of support had been apparent over the last six years, it would have made a real difference. Perhaps it is making a difference even now. Public sympathy for the victims may have pressured Vladimir Putin to allow those in the surviving liberated sliver of Aleppo to evacuate rather than face annihilation. At the time of writing, the fate of the deal is in doubt, subject to the whims of the militias on the ground. If it works out and the tens of thousands currently trapped are allowed to leave – the best possible outcome – then we will be witnesses to an internationally brokered forced population transfer. This is both a war crime and a crime against humanity, and a terrible image of the precarious state of the global system. The weight of this event, and its future ramifications, deserve more than just a few demonstrations.

The abandonment of Aleppo is a microcosm of the more general abandonment of Syria’s

Casablanca, Morocco

democratic revolution. It exposes the failures of the Arab and Muslim worlds, of the West, and of humanity as a whole.

Many Syrians expected the global left would be first to support their cause, but most leftist commentators and publications retreated into conspiracy theories, Islamophobia, and inaccurate geo-political analysis, and swallowed gobbets of Assadist propaganda whole. Soon they were repeating the ‘war on terror’ tropes of the right.

The Obama administration provided a little rhetorical support, and sometimes allowed its allies to send weapons to the Free Army. Crucially, however, Obama vetoed supply of the anti-aircraft weapons the Free Army so desperately needed to counter Assad’s scorched earth. In August 2013, when Assad killed 1500 people with sarin gas in the Damascus suburbs, Obama’s chemical ‘red line’ vanished, and the US more or less publically handed Syria over to Russia and Iran.

Because the Iran Iraq war was followed by an endless succession of conflicts, we forget its foundational horror. Killing at least a million, burning entire cities, and propelling identity politics towards its current fascistic heights, it was the region’s equivalent of World War One.

Iraq started the war. Exploiting Iran’s mid-revolution weakness, Iraqi forces invaded, seeking to annex Khuzestan province. Had Saddam Hussein been a leader interested in safeguarding civil and national rights, Iranian oppression of Khuzestan’s Ahwazi Arabs might have provided justication. But Saddam was a tyrant who oppressed Iraq’s Arabs just as much, and his prime concern was the province’s oil wealth. His brutal aggression included raining poisonous gas on Iranian cities.

No-one can fault the Iranians for the passion of their response. Gulf, Western and Soviet support for Iraq’s war understandably exacerbated the Iranian sense of victimhood which persists, and clouds so many minds, until today. After a certain point, however, the Iranian war lost its defensive character. Khomeini rejected a 1982 truce offer from a chastened Saddam, determined to fight on until Iran occupied the Shia holy cities of southern Iraq. This never happened, but war conditions helped Khomeini neutralise Iran’s revolutionary energies and firmly establish his own rule. The war dragged on for another six years.

Aleppo is 7000 years old, its mythical origins mixed up with the prophet Abraham and a milk cow, its opulent history underwritten by its place on the Silk Road. Socially and architecturally unique, in its pre-war state Muslims and Christians, and Arabs, Armenians, Turkmen and Kurds, lived and traded in streets redolent sometimes of the Ottoman empire, sometimes of corners of Paris. Before the war Aleppo contained the world’s largest and most intact Arab-Islamic Old City. Now – with the covered souq, the Umayyad mosque, and many other markets, baths and caravansarays destroyed – that honour passes to Morocco’s Fes.

The city’s working class eastern districts have been liberated twice in the last five years. On the first occasion, July 2012, armed farmers swept in from the countryside to join urban revolutionaries against their Assadist tormentors and for a few weeks it felt the Assad regime would crumble in Syria’s largest city and economic powerhouse. But the battle soon succumbed to the war’s general logic: rebel ammunition ran out, the fighters squabbled and looted, foreign jihadists took advantage as the stalemate extended.

These strangers pranced about on blast-traumatised horses, imposed their brutal versions of sharia law, murdered a fifteen-year-old coffee-seller for supposed blasphemy, and finally declared themselves a state.

In January 2014, prompted by popular anger, the entire armed rebellion declared war on ISIS, driving it out of western Syria, Aleppo city included. This was the second liberation.

Aleppo is Syria’s most important centre of civil activism. It houses revolutionary councils and emergency healthcare projects, independent newspapers and radio stations, theatre groups and basement schools. Despite the years of barrel bombs and scud missiles, 300,000 people remain in the liberated zone.

On a pier poking into the icy turquoise of Lake Michigan, looking back at Chicago’s brutal towers, Leila and I were interviewed on Syria by Jerome McDonnell, an engaging host, for WBEZ’s Worldview. We talked about Razan Zaitouneh, revolutionary councils, imperialist intervention, American policy, Islamism, Robert Fisk, and the farmers and dentists who make history. Jerome McDonnell hosted us again that evening at Chicago University’s International House.